From yesterday's How to Think Like A Scientist, which spoke to encountering and countering, claims with no evidence, here's what was going to be a Master Class at PGCS 2020, but was canceled because of Covid. Hoping we'll be in Canberra in 2021.
Here's the summary of the Master Class
Starting with Root Cause Analysis of Possible Project Failure Sources and Taking Corrective and Preventive Actions to Remove or Create Barriers to Increase the Probability of Success.
Primary Causes of Project Failure
- Four Programmatic Sources of Failure
- Unrealistic performance expectations, with missing Measures of Effectiveness and Measures of Performance
- Unrealistic Cost and Schedule estimates based on inadequate risk adjusted growth models
- Inadequate assessment of risk and unmitigated exposure to these risks with proper handling plans
- Unanticipated technical issues without alternative plans and solutions to maintain effectiveness of the product or service
- System Engineering Sources of Failure
- Inadequate understanding of requirements
- Lack of systems engineering disciple, and authority
- Lack of technical planning and oversight
- Lack of subject matter expertise
- Program Management Sources of Failure
- Incomplete, obsolete, inflexible system architectures
- Overestimates of technology maturity
- Failure to identify risks and their handling
Strategies to Prevent and Correct Sources of Program Failure
- Programmatic Strategy
- Define Effectiveness and Performance Expectations
- Definitize Cost and Schedule estimates to needed levels of accuracy and precision
- Develop Risk Management models based on Epistemic and Aleatory Uncertainties
- Define Technical Performance Measures and Key Performance Parameters
- Systems Engineering
- Model System Requirement dependencies
- Install Systems engineering discipline
- Provide risk-based Technical Planning and Oversight
- Assure Subject Matter Expertise available for all system elements
- Program Management
- Define System and Programmatic Architectures
- Assess Technology Maturity and Readiness Levels
- Define and apply measures of Physical Percent Complete and use them to produce Estimates to Complete and Estimates at Completion
Tools and Process Needed to Prevent or Correct Project Failure
- Identifying corrective actions
- Reducible impacts
- Irreducible impacts
- Identifying preventive actions
- Root Cause Analysis
- Pre-mortems
- Barriers
- Implementing corrective actions
- Implementing preventive actions
- Confirming effectiveness of preventive action
- Confirming effectiveness of corrective actions
